At the United Reformed Church (51��Ƶ) 2022 Minister’s Gathering, hundreds of ministers and Church Related Community Workers (CRCWs) signed the back of a poster version of the cover of ’s April edition.

The moving cover reminds us to keep Ukraine in our prayers, and is available as a poster for churches, for free here.

The Revd Najla Kassab, a Lebanese pastor and President of the World Communion of Reformed Churches who was one of the guest speakers at the event – held from 9-12 May at Yarnfield Park Training and Conference Centre in Stone, near Stafford – left the gathering earlier than expected as she was presented with the opportunity to travel to Ukraine to meet with the Bishop of the Reformed Church in Trans-Carpathia, Sándor Zán Fábián, in Kyiv.

Najla took the signed poster with her to show the Bishop the 51��Ƶ’s continued love, support and prayers for all affected by the murderous and unnecessary conflict.

Steve Tomkins, Editor of Reform, said: “It’s really good to see the cover of Reform turned into a poster and used by churches across the denomination. We distributed hundreds.”

The gathering was a space for ministers and CRCWs to be inspired and encouraged through a full programme of activities which blended keynote addresses, Bible studies, workshops, worship, including space for conversation and reflection.

Posters from Reform and other prayers and resources about the war are available here.

More about the Ministers’ Gathering can be found here.

If you’d like to keep up-to-date with news, comment, inspiration and debate find a range of subscription offers for Reform .

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She was due to speak on Thursday as well, but has been presented with the opportunity to visit Ukraine and spend time with the Reformed Churches there – so the 51��Ƶ is very happy to release her!

Mrs Kassab spoke on the theme of hospitality as the calling of the Church. In the hotel industry, she said, there is a difference between service and hospitality. Service is about doing what we trained to do;  hospitality is concerned with how others feel. “Hospitality,” she said, “is about them not us. It is not merely service but rather a way to make people happy, respected, and dignified. It is stepping in their shoes and trying to lessen their struggle and pain.”

Looking at the stories of the good Samaritan and of Mary and Martha, she said that the former is an example of going beyond what is expected to provide hospitality; the latter shows that the spirit in which we offer hospitality is more important than our actions. “The spirit in which we offer hospitality affects the impact of hospitality. Hospitality is not an act of pity but is rooted in our faith.”

Sharing stories from the work of the Presbyterian Church in Lebanon, visiting prisons and providing schools for Syrian refugees, Mrs Kassab said some members feared this work would trouble the Church and felt it was not their responsibility. Others looked at them as children of God who deserve to be protected from the streets, and enjoy dignified life and learn to read and write.

“This ministry shaped who we are as the Church today. We discovered that unless we reflect hospitality in our daily life, then we have missed the real meaning of the Gospel and the love of God to all people.” The Church, she added, is called to take hospitality outside its walls.

“As leaders we are called to create new spaces of hospitality and new ways of hospitality,” said Mrs Kassab. She shared stories of changing attitudes to the ministry of women in Syria. “God surprises us with new attitudes,” she said. “God surprises us in new places.”

She continued, “If we want to be surprised as a Church, we need to offer hospitality; If we want to be revived as a Church, we need to offer hospitality. The table is the Lord’s table, not ours.”

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In Luke, Jesus’ encounter with Satan immediately precedes his return to Nazareth and his proclamation of the “the year of the Lord’s favour” (“jubilee”) in his home town synagogue (Luke 4). Hence Pádraig’s title: “Before the Jubilee”’.

Pádraig, a compelling poet and teacher whose work centres around themes of language, power, conflict and religion, opened with thoughts on the deeply human experience of confession – moments of powerful encounter when we say: “I have something to tell you. . .” He envisaged that there must have been a moment when Jesus turned to his disciples and confessed the temptations he had faced in the wilderness. What was it like for Jesus to re-tell this story – to say: “I faced a part of me that I had to face. . . I have something to tell you about what tempts me.”

Pádraig noted that the temptations begin with “If” (“Since”): “If you are the Son of God. . .” Jesus, by this stage, has “a disturbing confidence” in who he is; the question now is what he should do with it. At 30, Jesus is facing his future and the nature of the temptations say something about what his deepest fears are at this point.

A temptation has to tempt – it has to get under your skin. That will be different for everybody. What got under Jesus’ skin? What were the temptations for Jesus? Short cuts to power, magic. . . He was asking: What drives me? What measure of adulation will I inspire? Or – will I throw it all away? (“Sometimes, we’re not so much tempted because of our inability but by our capacity.”) And what is important to note about the role of Satan (tempter/adversary) is that Jesus recognises in him someone just like himself. “Temptation is when something looks like you, sounds like you, is as clever like you.” (Pádraig recommended a series of cartoons, entitled “ as one depiction of Jesus’ experience in the wilderness.*)

Pádraig identified Jesus’ anxiety about what it means to be followed – to have the power that attracts others to follow, or to show antagonism towards you. It is an anxiety characterised by Jesus’ awareness both of the private (revealing his temptations in some personal disclosure to his disciples) and the public and political (as demonstrated in the following encounters with the townspeople of Nazareth). After proclaiming the Jubilee and his role in it, the crowd threatens to throw Jesus of a cliff – a telling echo of his own temptation to hurl himself from a great height in during his temptations. At this point, Jesus “disappears into the crowd” – in effect, allowing the confrontation to dissipate. (Pádraig also referred to the three manifestations of hostility identified by Wilfred Bion (Experiences in Groups, 1961): aggression; pairing, and adulation. Even adulation/praise, Jesus had realised, is something to be wary of.)

With a deep and powerful capacity to attract people to him or to engage in confrontation, Jesus is nevertheless able to say not now, this is not the time. Jesus had the resources to pay attention to what was needed at the time. And his response to aggression differed at different times at his life, culminating in his arrest, when he chose not to disappear into the crowd.

Pádraig observed that, as well as being a “pastoral” gospel, the Gospel of Luke powerfully depicts the political context of the time; Jesus was responding to the aggression of occupation. The cross is a symbol of empire at its most brutal, from which the disciples wanted to be freed. Oppression, Pádraig said, brings people to wish for all kinds of jubilee. And Jubilee is always something to which the whole community is called and which requires the individual to modify their capacity, as Jesus had demonstrated during the temptations in the wilderness.

Pádraig concluded by asking what this means for us. At a personal level: listen to the inner life and what tempts you. Don’t be appalled by it but pay attention to it and find a group to speak to (cf. 12 step programme). At a public level: Jubilee is always proclaimed at times of oppression – so what’s happening in our world and communities – who’s been manipulating power in public?

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The Ministers’ Gathering of the 51��Ƶ takes place every four years for Ministers and Church Related Community Workers to find refreshment, encouragement, affirmation and appreciation through keynote addresses, workshops and space for conversation and reflection.

Here you can download resources, watch videos and read updates from the 2022 event.

Resources

In the closing session of the Ministers’ Gathering, General Secretary John Bradbury shared some reflections about what had been explored at the event: 

• Life in the Spirit (Word | 15kb)

The Revd Najla Kassab, President of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, spoke at the Ministers’ Gathering. Here are resources from her talks: 

• Jubilee is a time of celebrating Hospitality (PPT | 108kb)
• Jubilee is a time of celebrating Hospitality (Word | 22kb)
• Jubilee is a time of celebrating life in the Spirit (PPT | 5mb)
• Jubilee is a time of celebrating life in the Spirit (Word | 27kb)
• World Communion of Reformed Churches logo (JPG | 2kb)
• Download logos for the 51��Ƶ 50th anniversary
• Hymn: The earth is yours, O Lord our God (Word | 24kb) – a hymn incorporating themes and phrases from sessions delivered at 51��Ƶ Ministers’ Gathering 2022 by Najla Kassab, Pádraig Ó Tuama, and Dr Meg Warner. Written by Dominic Grant. Suggested tune: “How can I keep from singing”

Workshop presentations

• Who do you think you are? (PPT | 118kb) – by the Revd David Cornick
• Who do you think you are? (Word | 42kb) – by the Revd David Cornick
• Handling an inheritance (PPT | 107kb) – by the Revd David Cornick
• Handling an inheritance (Word | 40kb) – by the Revd David Cornick
• Rewilding the church (PPT | 17mb) – by Steve Aisthorpe
• Using our church building for change (PDF | 765kb) – by Sarah Rogers and Jo Beacroft-Mitchell
• Using our church building for change – business model canvas (Word | 20kb) – by Sarah Rogers and Jo Beacroft-Mitchell

Bible studies by Dr Meg Warner

• Bible study 1: Aliens and tenants (Word | 15kb)
• Bible study 2: Spirit, Word and slavery (Word | 16kb)
• Bible study 3: “But if there’s a murder …” (Word | 15kb)

Music

Where possible we have listed links to the daily music played at the Ministers’ Gathering.

Monday

• – Matt Redman, Jonas Myrin
• – Joel Payne
• – Swee Hong Lim
• – Bernadette Farrell
• – Marty Haugen
• – Grayson Warren Brown
• – James E Moore Jr

Tuesday

• – Sam Hargreaves
• – South Africa
• – sung to Rowan Tree
• – Shirley Erena Murray/Colin Gibson

Wednesday

• – traditional
• – Adam ML Tice
• – John L Bell
• – Chris Tomlin

Thursday

• – Taizé
• – Joel Payne, Matt Weeks
• – Daniel Iverson
• – Doris Akers

Updates from the event

• Ministers’ show Bishop support with signed Ukraine Reform poster Ministers have ensured that their support for Ukraine was conveyed loudly and clearly last week when hundreds of ministers and Church Related Community Workers (CRCWs) signed the back of a poster version of the cover of Reform’s April edition

• Ministers Gathering 2022: A time of celebrating hospitality The Revd Najla Kassab, President of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, spoke at the United Reformed Church (51��Ƶ) Ministers’ Gathering on Tuesday and Wednesday
• Ministers’ Gathering 2022: Before the jubilee Pádraig Ó Tuama’s first address to the United Reformed Church’s Ministers’ Gathering 2022 was a reflection on the temptations of Jesus as retold in the Gospel of Luke.

• Ministers’ Gathering 2022: Who is the United Reformed Church? The Revd David Cornick, former Principal of Westminster College Cambridge, and former General Secretary of both the United Reformed Church (51��Ƶ) and Churches Together in England, led a workshop at the Ministers’ Gathering which explored the history of 51��Ƶ.

• Ministers’ Gathering 2022: The 51��Ƶ at 50 The Revd Dr John Bradbury, the United Reformed Church (51��Ƶ) General Secretary, spoke to the 51��Ƶ’s Ministers’ Gathering on Monday afternoon, in a talk entitled: ‘The 51��Ƶ at 50: Maturing nicely or mid-life crisis?’

• Hundreds attend Ministers’ Gathering 2022 Two hundred and fifty of the United Reformed Church Ministers and Church Related Community Workers from the denomination’s 13 synods, are spending four days being refreshed and encouraged at the 2022 Ministers’ Gathering.

The post Ministers’ Gathering appeared first on United Reformed Church.

Explaining that the 51��Ƶ has a complicated DNA, David took ministers through the 51��Ƶ’s 2,000-year-old Jewish roots, through its 500-year-old Protestant, Reformed, dissenting, ‘restorationist’, evangelical, liberal roots; to our ecumenical roots that have developed over the past 100 years; and through our increasingly globalised and multicultural roots that have developed over the past 50 years.

Talking about the origins of the Congregational and the Presbyterian traditions, David traced their development over the centuries to where we are today.

Ministers broke out into small workshops and discussed the following questions:

• What do I most cherish about my inheritance in the 51��Ƶ?
• What frustrates me most about my inheritance in the 51��Ƶ?
• What parts of that inheritance can inspire us in today’s mission?
• What should we throw on the bonfire?

In part two of the workshop, David explored what historians and sociologists of religion think has been happening over the last half century. He guided the gathering through the birth of ecumenism in the early 20th century, its challenges, through to ecumenism in mid to late 20th century; the experience of secularisation, and the decline in church membership, a dominant contour of the western European Christian landscape.

Although we cannot ignore the fading social influence of religion in a society, the fact that pews are thinning out and congregations are growing older, David explained that church history growth and decline have co-existed.

“There have always been individual congregations which have bucked the trend,” he said pointing to the “growth of Pentecostalism and the New Churches, to Anglican ‘Fresh Expressions’ and to the experience of church growth in London as evidence of either ‘de-secularization’ or ‘re-sacralisation’”.

In the past 50 years, 43 of which David has been ordained, it is his reflection that the Church is facing a profoundly difficult mission context.

“But” he said, “it is worth remembering that as Western Europe has become increasingly secularised, the centre of Christian gravity has moved decisively to the southern hemisphere. It is a nice irony that migration has made that southern vibrancy part of British Christian experience, and indeed of the United Reformed Church. That is a small lesson in perspective.”

“What does Jesus say to us, the church in Western Europe, in Britain, this odd, bizarre mission field?” David continued.

“Be set free, live the jubilee in which good news is for the poor, prisoners are set free, the blind see and the oppressed leap with life and laughter. And if they pass by, well, let them.

“Remember, they tried to throw me off a cliff.”

• Read the text of David’s detailed history of the 51��Ƶ and its roots here: part one, Who is the 51��Ƶ? and part two, Handling an Inheritance.
• Watch the talks here: 

David Cornick and Robert Pope have edited a book about the 51��Ƶ’s first 50 years which will be launched at General Assembly in July.

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Our world, he said, was turned upside down by the Covid pandemic – embracing new technology, restrictions on funerals, different ways of staying connected. New worshipping communities and ways of reaching people emerged, international links were strengthened.

“But we are tired,” he said. “My goodness, we’re really tired. And we still don’t know what this pandemic has done to us.” Experiences have varied enormously, he said. Some are excited, some ground down, some traumatised.

Although our situation does not compare to what our brothers sisters elsewhere in the world face, said Dr Bradbury, this is the most challenging time for the western Church since the Reformation. The rapid changes we were going through were brought into focus and intensified by the pandemic. Some churches didn’t survive. Many of us are running a hospice ministry, he said, which is tough and draining. A third of any congregation may not yet have returned; how worried should we be about that? We are surrounded by a culture of disinterest in organised religion; and yet young people pray more than in previous generations.

Funerals for the wider community were, ten years ago a mainstay of evangelism, said Dr Bradbury, but they have disappeared from churches. Union is no longer the ecumenical game in town. And yet the 51��Ƶ is still having an impact, through JPIT, through ecumenical instruments, in the public square and in the world Church.

These are the matters that the Church Life Review Group has been formed to look at.

Meeting a couple of weeks ago, the group is agreed, “One last programme or mission strategy will not sort us out.” Instead, said Dr Bradbury, we need to tend the vineyard.

One area of change that that must involve, he said, is deployment. Ministers are spread evermore thinly – soon in the 51��Ƶ there will be at average of seven congregations per minister. ‘Too many of us wonder if we can make it to retirement at the rate we’re going. Too many of us wonder if our calling to ministry is being fulfilled in what we’re doing.’

“We have no immediate magic solutions,” said Dr Bradbury, but the group did sees ways forward. There is work we can do that will be free congregations and ministers from some of the burden of compliance. We believe in this stuff, he said – safeguarding, health and safety, charity regulations – but we often feel we will be overwhelmed, and it takes a vast amount of time away from other things.

Another helpful prospect, he said, is that the thinktank Theos is doing qualitative research for the 51��Ƶ – conversations about what works and what does not, not simply questionnaires. They are talking to a representative set of local churches asking them what flourishing would look like for them and how can it be fostered.

Another point to be considered, he said, is that, ironically, church closures have released financial resources, increasing synod funds from £150m to £200m. That is in addition to what local churches are sitting on, ‘for a rainy day’. It is raining, said Dr Bradbury.

As ministers, he said, we see good deaths and less good deaths. A congregation has a good death when members feel their ministry is completed and has led to new life elsewhere. This is like the way Christ set his face to death, didn’t avoid it, but prepared for it, and went through death to resurrection. Most of the 51��Ƶ’s money is the result of deaths of congregations. ‘Do we build ever bigger barns,’ he asked, ‘or believe that money released can fund flourishing work elsewhere?’

Each year, 60% of our budget is spent by General Assembly and 40% by synods. That means that 14 separate bodies are spending, and it is very hard to get global picture of what we’re spending and what wealth we have. Where our money is, said Dr Bradbury, our heart is. When we find out where it is, we may need to do some soul-searching to decide whether that is where we want it to be.

The Church Life Review Group is bringing to this year’s General Assembly (for discussion, rather than immediate voting) proposals for a radical overhaul of the central committee structure. It also proposes that the 51��Ƶ become more proactive in attending to churches where life as it is has become unsustainable.

“There are some very real possibilities for flourishing,” said Dr Bradbury. “There are things we need to face; and facing them is a profound act of hope.”

He concluded with a warm tribute to the work of the 51��Ƶ’s ministers, saying: “There is no greater gift to God’s church than ministry. There is no higher calling than to be a minister  of the gospel. The church owes you all a huge debt of gratitude.”

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From 9-12 May, ministers were gifted with time to be inspired and encouraged with a full programme of activities which blended keynote addresses, Bible studies, workshops, worship and space for conversation and reflection.

The gathering, at Yarnfield Park Training and Conference Centre in Stone, near Stafford, opened with worship led by the Revd Dr Douglas Gay, Church of Scotland minister who teaches practical theology at the University of Glasgow, and Iain McLarty, a worship development worker for the Church of Scotland.

Guest speakers included Najla Kassab, President of the World Communion of the Reformed Churches; Pádraig Ó Tuama, a compelling poet and skilled speaker, teacher and group worker, whose work centres around themes of language, power, conflict and religion; and the Revd David Cornick, a former as General Secretary of the 51��Ƶ and Churches Together in England.

Workshops explored a range of topics such as: rewilding the church, the 51��Ƶ Church Life Review, hybrid church in an age of digitalisation, white privilege, climate change after COP and beyond stewardship, leading your church into growth, pastoral supervision, church on the wild side, singing, simplifying church, the 51��Ƶ’s discipleship programme Stepwise, using your church building for change, the opportunities the jubilee presents to reset, and resilience.

The Revd Christopher Ford of, St Andrews with Castle Gate in the South Nottingham area of 51��Ƶ, said: “I went to the first Ministers’ Gathering in 2018 which was brilliant. What brought me back was the opportunity to meet with other ministers, which we don’t get to do very often. Obviously, I came for the input to, but the opportunity to meet as we do here is invaluable.”

“I’ve had a brilliant time,” added the Revd John Macaulay, Minister of Upper Clapton 51��Ƶ. “What brought me here was my commitment to being a 51��Ƶ Minister and the opportunity for inspiration, encouragement and reflection. I’m having a great time.”

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